Starling bank intensified its crackdown on customer crypto trading as the bank announced a block on all crypto transactions for customers, describing the activity as “high risk and heavily used for criminal purposes.”
Starling customers were sent a text message today which read: “We consider crypto activity to be high risk.
“We’ve taken the decision to prevent all card payments to crypto merchants and to implement further restrictions on outgoing and incoming transfers.”
Starling is the latest bank to impose restrictions on customer crypto activity, joining the likes of Lloyds, Barclays and RBS who have imposed a range of new measures including blocking credit card payments and blocking transactions with crypto exchanges.
It comes just two weeks after Santander set fresh limits on transactions in Bitcoin and Ethereum and warned of the risks of investing in crypto assets.
From the 15th of November, Santander mobile and online bankingcustomers were restricted to a £1,000 limit for individual cryptocurrency transactions and a £3,000 cap on transactions in a rolling 30-day period. Payments sent to cryptocurrency exchange Binance will continue to be blocked, while payments from cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, will still be permitted.
47% of UK banks don’t allow customers to interact with crypto exchanges, according to personal finance comparison site finder.com.
A Starling Bank spokesperson said: “Starling has had restrictions of varying degrees on crypto transactions for some time, like many other banks. We recently tightened restrictions on inbound and outbound transactions by card and bank transfer.
“Today’s message was to make sure that customers who have made such transactions in the past, but not recently, are aware of this.
“The innovative technology, and thinking, behind cryptocurrencies have great potential advantages, however, right now, they are high risk and heavily used for criminal purposes and, as such, we no longer support them.”
